Continuing where my first post on George Packer’s Knowing the Enemy left off, I’ll consider some of the article’s strategic aspects.

Packer introduces LTC David Kilcullen, an Australian Army officer currently on loan to the US State Department, who makes the following point:

It’s really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms… The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat.

As I have written before, this sort of precision and clear vision is absolutely fundamental to successful strategic thinking. If we can only speak in generalities, then we will be unable to recognize when opportunities present themselves. When we are unable to clearly circumscribe a threat, we make al Qaeda’s job easier because they are actively working to make themselves look like a global movement. Kilcullen points out that we need to look for ways to disaggregate the movement,

finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad.

In order to narrowly define the enemy and disaggregate insurgencies, we need to have positive statements of what our objectives are. Ridding the world of terrorism, denying terrorists sanctuary in Iraq, preventing attacks on the US and reducing oppression are all negative definitions - they say what we want to prevent. What are our objectives? Spreading democracy is vague and begs the question of what qualifies as democracy (does just holding elections count? how about an independent judiciary? where do free markets fit in?). Grand strategy involves synthesis.

What is it that we want to stand for? I think that transparency is a good principle that could serve as a strategic wedge. John Robb has been mulling over the topic lately. Incidentally, this is an area where I see his and Tom Barnett’s work harmonizing, since a basic element of globalization is increased transparency. On the strategic level, focusing on this principle would help orient ourselves properly to the geostrategic environment. It would, for example, have led us to address Abu Ghriab in the manner that COL (ret.) Steve Fondacaro believes we should have:

I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. “You’re talking to a radical here,” Fondacaro said. “Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don’t let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight.” He added, “Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it.”

Transparency dictates that even if the news is bad - in fact, especially if the news is bad - then we had had better be the first ones to break it. We won’t always be right, but we can still demonstrate integrity if we admit when we are wrong.

Returning to the article at hand, the point is to “define the enemy as narrowly as you can get away with.” If we do not, and instead reduce our strategic thinking to opposing generalizations like totalitarianism or Islamofascism, then (in the words of McFate) we will “mislead policymakers into greatly increasing the number of our enemies and coming up with wrongheaded strategies against them.”